‘Like a Virgin’: Hymenoplasty and Secret Marriage in Egypt

ABSTRACT

In Egypt, women seek hymenoplasty to disguise evidence of premarital sexual intercourse. Physicians hide the fact that they perform the procedure, and laypeople condemn it as against religion and morality, a way of cheating men of knowledge of their wives’ sexual history. Yet high-ranking religious leaders have condoned hymenoplasty. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and formal interviews with laypeople and physicians, in this article, I investigate this discrepancy between religious and lay opinions. Many Egyptians believe women resort to hymenoplasty after contracting secret `urfi (customary) marriages, and I examine the relationship between hymenoplasty and extramarital and paramarital sexuality. Egyptian debates around hymenoplasty and marriage are concerned with the notion that women’s sexual status must be socially visible, believing that doctors and kin have the ability and obligation to read women’s sexual history through physiological markers and social rituals. Hymenoplasty and secret marriage render women’s sexual histories illegible to observers.

KEYWORDS:

• Fatwa
• hymens
• hymenoplasty
• Islam
• medicalization

Acknowledgments

I thank my research assistants, Dr. Hossam Moustafa Abdel Hafez and Saffaa Hassanein, and my many informants. I wish to thank the staff at Al-Azhar University’s International Islamic Center for Population Studies and Research for hosting me as an affiliated scholar. Thanks also to Beth Baron, Angel Foster, Will Hanley, Marcia Inhorn, Hanan Kholoussy, and Rania Salem; the Anthropology Departments of Yale, Princeton, and the Australian National University; and three anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier versions of this paper, and a special thanks to Hanan Kholoussy for suggesting the title for this article.

Funding

This study was funded by Macquarie University and a Discovery Project grant from the Australian Research Council (DP120103974).

Notes

1. While sometimes glossed as ‘slums,’ `ashwa’iyyat refers to large housing developments consisting of apartment buildings, several stories high. They are not built to code, may be structurally unsound and have unreliable access to water and electricity as well as inadequate waste removal infrastructure.

2. Marriage is constituted in both the legal marriage contract, katib al-kitab, and sexual consummation of the union; the former renders a couple married, but lack of consummation makes marriage incomplete and can be grounds for dissolution of the marriage. For some families, katib al-kitab marks the beginning of an engagement period during which the technically married couple can get to know each other without constant chaperonage before the public marriage ceremony and subsequent consummation take place. If the couple have sex (or are believed to have sex) during this period, they are protected from social and legal consequences by the fact that they are already married.

3. The fake blood capsule is inserted into the vagina before intercourse; body heat and friction rupture the capsule and produce the illusion of virginal bleeding.

4. As far as I know it was never actually banned, but the website that used to sell is it now defunct.

5. The use of the phrase “sexual health technology” must be qualified: while it is a medical technology applied after sex in order to protect a woman’s health from social consequences (e.g., social ostracism or domestic violence resulting from her social network becoming aware of socially proscribed sexual activity), it does not directly improve her sexual health and indeed may have iatrogenic consequences (as do many other sexual and reproductive health technologies).

6. The plural of the Arabic word fatwa is fatawa, but in this article I use the English plural, ‘fatwas.’

7. An August 1999 article in the Arabic-language Egyptian press described a case where a girl was raped by her father and went to Sayyed Tantawi, the head Sheikh of al-Azhar. Among other reparations mandated for this gross violation of Islamic law, Sheikh Tantawi said that the girl’s family must provide hymenoplasty to her and must keep the rape secret so that she can get married in the future without the stigma of her father’s action being permanently attached to her. Tantawi made a point of noting that he himself did not ask the girl’s name, in order to protect her privacy, and in acknowledgment that reputation was everything when it comes to a young woman’s virginity.

8. When informants told me that most people would first consult with their local imam on matters of religious jurisprudence, they were speaking generally, not about hymenoplasty in particular.

9. The relationship between Dar al-Ifta, the legislature, and the judiciary is complex. Here I have glossed it and reported my informants’ views on when they would seek a fatwa from Dar al-Ifta, but see Skovgaard-Petersen (1997) for more in-depth discussion of this relationship and see Agrama (2012) in particular for a careful comparison of the ways that laypeople regard fatwas and rulings from shari`a courts.

10. The Al Azhar doctors interviewed described being frequently approached for “virginity testing” by women who offered a range of excuses for why they thought their hymens might not be intact. These doctors presented these requests for “virginity testing” as a way that women cautiously approached the topic of hymenoplasty.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by Macquarie University and a Discovery Project grant from the Australian Research Council (DP120103974).

Notes on contributors

L. L. Wynn

Lisa L. Wynn is associate professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Pyramids and Nightclubs (2007), and co-editor of Emergency Contraception: The Story of a Reproductive Health Technology (2012). Her research on reproductive health technologies in Egypt is supported by Macquarie University and by a Discovery Project grant from the Australian Research Council.